my thoughts of class and education, let me show you them

When my son was a little under a year old, me and my mom forgot him in the car for five entire seconds, or to translate this into motion, three steps from the car and the length of time it took to recognize that we could hear the sounds of nature around us and not the glorious descant of his unhappiness.

For those who know me, I considered leaving him there because of the effort required to retrieve him, but as he survived with only a few nightmares about being abandoned to die in a van, I'm pretty sure he's gotten over it, and what time does not cure, I daresay a therapist can fix. This brings me to the question that hits me every summer when children are left in cars and die. As this is not even uncommon, which in a variety of ways freaks me out and I can't talk about in any sensible fashion.

This is why I am thinking about this.

Raise your hand if you did not see that verdict coming.



Now granted, people who do social work for long periods of time tend to go either extremist or go numb; there's middle ground, but at least at the casework level, I've met very few of them. Anyone who reads here knows my virulent loathing of classism (and my own part in perpetuating it) isn't something I'm hot to hide.

So my bias is showing; my first reaction on any case is to check the job and class when something in the general family of child negligence occurs, because fairly often I can make a decent prediction based on that how the case will be handled. I usually don't need to dig for race--if they aren't white, the article will mention it, and you'd be amazed at the sudden intersection of race and class how accurate the prediction gets.

This bothered me because denying the racial aspect is kind of like denying Ike is coming down the Gulf. And it bothered me because I'm looking thoughtfully at the Dr before her name and wondering about bias when she faces her social and class peers--two lawyers, one judge, all of whom share that level of higher education. It's not like this is new--we've been not-talking about class bias forever, but I'm not sure anyone's gotten around to a crosscheck on education bias; they look a lot alike. And yet I don't think they are the same thing. And I could be convinced that they look a lot less alike than we think, simply because class and education can overlap so heavily that we can be looking at one and mistake it for the other.

Also:

In the past, Deters has said that he would have to prove that Edwards left her daughter in the minivan purposefully and that truly forgetting is not a crime.

You have got to be fucking with me.



I feel--well, I don't feel better. But I have more coffee.

Comments

[auroramama]

Early-onset dementia? That's all I can think of.

[suaine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I said in another comment just now that they would have to be severely mentally impaired. A baby is a pretty damn big thing to forget.